James Nachtwey

Amazing collection of images by a photographer drawn toward trouble. Some are pretty horrible. Above, a relic of the war in Nicaragua becomes a piece of playground equipment. Below, a refugee returns to her home in Kosovo to help with the harvest.

Climate Change Can Happen Fast

From New Scientist:

Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or "Big Freeze"[which] lasted around 1300 years.

Until now, it was thought that the mini ice age took a decade or so to take hold, on the evidence provided by Greenland ice cores. Not so, say William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and his colleagues.

The group studied a mud core from an ancient lake, Lough Monreagh, in western Ireland. Using a scalpel they sliced off layers 0.5 to 1 millimetre thick, each representing up to three months of time. No other measurements from the period have approached this level of detail.

Carbon isotopes in each slice revealed how productive the lake was and oxygen isotopes gave a picture of temperature and rainfall. They show that at the start of the Big Freeze, temperatures plummeted and lake productivity stopped within months, or a year at most. "It would be like taking Ireland today and moving it up to Svalbard" in the Arctic, says Patterson.

Nobody knows what caused the Younger Dryas; the new theory that it was caused by the impact of a comet is not holding up very well. The older theory that it began when a massive glacial lake covering most of northwestern Canada burst its banks and flowed into the north Atlantic has never convinced a lot of people. But we do know that it both began and ended very quickly.

The Grant Memorial

A review of a new book about monumental Washington reminded me of my favorite heroic sculpture, Henry Shrady's statue of U.S. Grant in front on the Capitol.

Galaxies Collide

Hubble photograph; click for a larger image.

The Wicker Husband

Wonderful little fable by Ursula Wills-Jones which begins like this:

Once upon a time, there was an ugly girl. She was short and dumpy, had one leg a bit shorter than the other, and her eyebrows met in the middle. The ugly girl gutted fish for a living, so her hands smelt funny and her dress was covered in scales. She had no mother or brother, no father, sister, or any friends. She lived in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of the village, and she never complained.
One by one, the village girls married the local lads, and up the path to the church they'd prance, smiling all the way. At the weddings, the ugly girl always stood at the back of the church, smelling slightly of brine. The village women gossiped about the ugly girl. They wondered what she did with the money she earnt. The ugly girl never bought a new frock, never made repairs to the house, and never drank in the village tavern.
Now, it so happened that outside the village, in a great damp swamp, lived an old basket-maker who was famed for the quality of his work. One day the old basket-maker heard a knock on his door. When he opened it, the ugly girl stood there. In her hand, she held six gold coins.
'I want you to make me a husband,' she said.
'Come back in a month,' he replied.

The House of Lords

Something about this debate gets me:

Lord Ashley of Stoke: Does my noble friend agree that this is a no-win situation, whichever way the Government turn? We cannot advocate noisy vehicles because of the environment and yet blind people and deaf people really are vulnerable to silent vehicles. The only realistic solution is to raise the awareness of the public and drivers.

Lord Adonis [for the government]: My Lords, as a Minister now for four and a half years, I am used to being in no-win situations. My perpetual quest is for the happy medium.

Lord Jenkin of Roding: My Lords, I declare an interest as a former member of the council of Guide Dogs for the Blind. I think that the Question could go a little wider. Cyclists are completely inaudible and frequently ride on pavements. Whether one is visually handicapped or not, they constitute a real peril to pedestrians. I think, if I may say so, that something ought to be done.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, cyclists should obey the law, like everyone else.

Lord McColl of Dulwich: My Lords, does the Minister accept that there might be a simpler solution? When I purchased one of these cars a few years ago, my wife, being very practical, said that the answer would be to put on the front of the car a small Swiss cowbell.

Lord Adonis: My Lords, I think this is England. Whether such Swiss innovations would go down well here is a matter for conjecture. We have nine months for a wide-scale public debate. I shall ensure that the noble Lord’s suggestion features prominently in that debate.

Lord Grenfell: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord McColl, has suggested that a cowbell may be the answer. Does the Minister agree that, from the position from which I am speaking, maybe a man with a red flag walking in front of the car would be better?

Lord Adonis: Your Lordships are full of such useful suggestions this afternoon. I believe it was Herbert Morrison who lifted the speed limit above 20 miles per hour, which it was until the 1920s in this country. That is where it had got to after people had ceased to be required to carry red flags before cars. I do not believe, though, that the future always lies in reinventing the past.

Opera and Suicide

Via Mind Hacks, a new study investigates whether Opera fans are more supportive of suicide:

Opera subculture and suicide for honor.

Death Studies. 2002 Jun;26(5):431-7.

Stack S.

The influence of music-based subcultures on suicidality has been the subject of much debate but little scholarly research. While previous work has documented that suicide is a remarkably frequent cause of death in opera, it has not explored the related consequences on opera's audience. In particular, the possible influence of the opera subculture on suicide acceptability has been largely unexplored. Suicide in the case of life without honor, the "Madame Butterfly Effect," is a theme in opera. Persons who are drawn into and/or influenced by the opera subculture of honor are hypothesized to be more accepting of suicide in the case of dishonor to one's family. Data are from the national general social surveys (N = 845). A multivariate logistic regression analysis finds that opera fans are 2.37 times more accepting of suicide because of dishonor than nonfans. Only two variables, religiosity and education, are more closely related to suicide acceptability than opera fanship. These are the first empirical results on the subject of opera and suicide acceptability.

Debating Afghanistan

I find it fascinating that the various people involved in debating our Afghanistan policy are getting increasingly vehement and public. Obviously this is an issue on which powerful people have widely diverging views are not afraid to let anyone know what they are. The news that the key figures on Obama's National Security Council were all leaning toward sending more troops has been followed just a day later by the news that our ambassador to Afghanistan opposes them. I think it is to Obama's credit that he is allowing this debate to go forward. I have complained before that our government regularly takes momentous decisions without thinking them through (the Bay of Pigs, the invasion of Iraq), and since there doesn't seem to be any particular urgency about this I think the drawn-out discussions are a good thing. Even though I still think Obama will in the end side with the theater commanders and send more troops, which I think is a terrible mistake. He is just too moderate to do anything so radical as walk away from a war he has said is "necessary."

Meanwhile, I have to wonder why the health care debate has to be all about cost and how everything will be paid for, but this doesn't seem to be an object when it comes to wars. It seems to me that any war worth fighting is worth raising taxes to pay for it, and if people don't want to pay those higher taxes, they don't really support the war, and ought to shut up and go home.

The Maxxi in Rome

The latest entry in the "cool art museum category" is the new Maxxi museum of contemporary art in Rome, by Zaha Hadid. It was just opened for an "architectural preview," even though there won't be any art on display for six more months. Which tells you right there what these flashy new museums are about -- they are one off giant sculptures and centers of urban artistic cool, with exhibitions of other art as a sort of afterthought. Can anybody name a work of art that is displayed at Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao?

This new building strikes me as dreary on the oustide -- Nicholas Ouroussoff called it "surprisingly sedate" in the NY Times -- but the interior views are actually quite striking. Obviously nobody can tell yet if it will be a good place to look at art, but I am favorably impressed. Slide show here.

Armistice Day

Jacob Levy:

There's commemorative cannon-fire outside my office right now, and I'm more disgusted than moved. Yet more artillery fire seems to me to miss what should be the point.

A Veteran's/ Armistice/ Remembrance Day observed on November 11 in particular shouldn't just mean a gauzy and somber honoring of live veterans and fallen soldiers. It should be in part a day of anger and horror about the particular war that ended on this day, the stupid brutality of it, and the evil that followed in its wake. Of course, no continuously-existing government (US, UK, Canada) is likely to create a day officially dedicated to pointing out that its predecessor contributed to the deaths of millions for no good cause. But we have the capacity to remember lessons other than the official ones.

When this day was established as an official holiday in the UK, Canada and the US, a lot of the rhetoric was about world peace and "never again." Funny that the thing has turned into another occasion for celebrating the heroism of soldiers.

Questions about BPA

Bisphenol A is a very common ingredient in all sorts of plastics; 2-3 million tons of the stuff are manufactured every year. However, it can mimic the activity of various human hormones, and large quantities of BPA have been shown to cause all sorts of health effects, from thyroid problems to neurological disorders. In particular, it can mimic estrogen. This had led to questions about whether it effects male sexual and reproductive health. A new study has just been published covering the effects of BPA on factory workers:

Researchers focused on 634 male workers at four factories in China who were exposed to elevated levels of BPA. They followed the men over five years and compared their sexual health with that of male workers in other Chinese factories where BPA was not present. The men handling BPA were four times as likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction and seven times as likely to have difficulty with ejaculation, said De-Kun Li, a scientist at the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute, which conducted the study with funds from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

The US FDA has just announced a major review of existing studies of the effects of BPA, along with $30 million in new grants for additional studies. Canada and some European countries are also conducting reviews. Since it is very difficult to measure the effects of small levels of mildly poisonous substances, I do not expect definitive data on the effects of small amounts of BPA. I expect that with or without data we will see a tightening regulatory regime, justified by the studies that show bad effects from large doses, and a gradual phase-out of BPA in many products. Meanwhile, if you need an excuse....

Scythian Gold

I had so much fun with the catalog from the Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures exhibit, which I got from the library, that I was inspired to track down the catalog from my favorite ever museum exhibit. This was Scythian Gold: Treasures from Ancient Ukraine, which I saw in Montreal in 2000. I tried to get a new copy of the catalog at the time, but it sold out everywhere. This time I found a used copy through ABE Books, and since it arrived I have been immersed it its glories. These treasures came from the tombs of Scythian kings and nobles, dating to between 600 and 200 BC.

Most of the spectacular golden treasures were made by Greek craftsmen, probably in the Greek colonies around the Black Sea. Some of the designs seem entirely classical in inspiration, but many were obviously made specifically for Scythian clients. They depict people with Scythian clothes and weapons, for example, and some seem to show scenes from Scythian mythology. The famous "Golden Fleece" pectoral (above -- click for a larger image) is one of those objects. It is divided into two bands, one showing the domestic life of pastoral peoples, the other showing lions and griffins hunting horses and boars.

My favorite object is one of the locally-made pieces, the staff top shown below. Surely this was carried by a Scythian shaman -- it resembles staffs carried by Siberian shamans in the 19th century -- as he recited his tales of journeys to the Other Lands, made his prophecies, and performed his cures.

Who Should Go to College?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has taken up one of my favorite themes, asking a bunch of "experts" who should go to college. The Chronicle is a fairly conservative publication, but on the other hand its main audience is college educators, so I am not sure how to assess its likely bias on this point. Anyway, they publish a variety of responses. We have a few hard core open door types:

Alison Wolf: Anyone who meets the entry criteria and is willing to pay the fees should be able to go. In one sense, that just passes the buck—politicians then have to decide how much subsidy they are willing to provide. But it shouldn't be up to them to decide how many people go, what they study, and why.

But most seem to agree that many Americans who go to four-year colleges shouldn't. They cite numbers like, only the 10 to 15 percent most academically inclined should go, or only the top 25 percent of high school graduates. Even those who think that everyone should have the option of going to college don't seem to think everyone should go; they just think the way should be open for "non-traditional" students who have the motivation if not the background. On the other hand, the experts also seem to agree that almost everyone should get some kind of post-high school education or training.

Marty Nemko: All high-school students should receive a cost-benefit analysis of the various options suitable to their situations: four-year college, two-year degree program, short-term career-prep program, apprenticeship program, on-the-job training, self-employment, the military. Students with weak academic records should be informed that, of freshmen at "four year" colleges who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high-school class, two-thirds won't graduate even if given eight and a half years. And that even if such students defy the odds, they will likely graduate with a low GPA and a major in low demand by employers. A college should not admit a student it believes would more wisely attend another institution or pursue a noncollege postsecondary option. Students' lives are at stake, not just enrollment targets.

Daniel Yankelovich: In today's society and economy, virtually everyone who has the motivation and stamina should acquire some form of postsecondary education. That is a practical reality of today's economy.

Cambyses' Lost Army

Italian archaeologists Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni claim that they have found the remains of an army sent into the Egyptian desert by the Persian king Cambyses around 525 BC. According to Herodotus, the army was sent to conquer the shrine of Amun at the oasis of Siwa but vanished into a sandstorm.

The finds include a mass grave, bronze weapons, hundreds of broken water pots, and jewelry. So even if this isn't Cambyses' army, or part of it, it is a very cool discovery.

I might add that the mass grave that drew the archaeologists' attention was actually found by local Bedouin, who dug it up and sold the best objects they found to tourists. As the Bluffer's Guide to Archaeology puts it, "the easiest way to find sites is to ask somebody who knows where they are."

Adoption and Identity

As the parent of an adopted girl from China, I read with great interest the NY Times story on a major study of adults who had been adopted from Korea as young children. The news seems to be that adopted children are just like everyone else.

Like everyone else, they complain about being teased as children. Some seem to think that they were teased for looking different, but in fact all children get teased for something. Nobody ever looked more like the majority group than I did, and I seem to recall getting teased a lot. Also, the adoptees have struggled with their identities and the question of who they are:

“The process of discovering who I am has been a long process, and I’m still on it.”

I don't mean to be glib, and I am sure that adopted children have greater issues about who they are, on average, then people who grow up with their biological parents. But it is important to see the identity struggles of adoptees as a particular case of an issue that almost everyone has, not something unique to their situation.

One pattern I found striking is that many of the adoptees spent their childhoods trying to blend in and be as white as possible, ignoring parental efforts to interest them in Korean culture. But then in high school or college they began to wonder more about where they came from and to get more interested in their Korean identities and their birth families. More than half had been to Korea. I believe this is also a very common pattern in our society. Children strive to be like their peers, whereas adults want to distinguish themselves and find a unique identity.

Where to Go?

Columnist Jeremy Clarkson of the London Times is so angry at the British government that he wants to emigrate, if only he could think of someplace to go:

You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly ...

You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. ... And you can’t go to Germany ... because you just can’t.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

The Wall Fell

I pause on this day to note that twenty years ago today, November 9, 1989, the German people broke through the Berlin Wall, the most optimistic day of my lifetime:

What confronted us at the Bornholmer bridge was beyond belief: a vast tide of people, some in tears, many just looking stunned, flooding across. Behind them were the huge glaring arc lights, guard huts, raised barriers and a line of puffing Trabant and Wartburg cars. Two East German border guards stood there looking bewildered. One, I remember, was crying. With no orders from above, the guards had simply buckled under the pressure of a 20,000 strong crowd of East Berliners chanting "Open the gate!" and raised the barriers.

Lions Know What to Do About Deer

A rather foolish deer jumped the fence into the lions' cage at the National Zoo yesterday. Although spectators cheered for the deer to escape -- evidently there were no gardeners among them -- the lions fatally injured the deer before keepers got them away. A bit of video here, revealing that zoo-bred lionesses are about as good at hunting deer as my cats are at hunting mice.

Given how many deer there are in Rock Creek Park -- last time I was there I stumbled into a group of 15, including two young fawns born out of season -- I am surprised this sort of thing doesn't happen all the time.

Los Angeles High School No. 9

Well, it truly doesn't look like most other schools. But is that a good thing or a bad thing? I can imagine some students loving it, especially if it becomes an arts magnet school like the architects hoped. I like that it is built around a courtyard. On the other hand the classrooms are in the four nondescript rectangular boxes you can see in the aerial photo, and there seem to be lots of blank concrete walls at ground level, so I can imagine other students calling it the prison and referring to the tall bit as the guard tower. More images here.

It also cost $232 million. I have to say, though, that this is probably not all that much more than it would have cost to build a pedestrian school of this size in downtown LA; the last time my county built a high school it cost $120 million for an ordinary building on a suburban site. (Think about that number next time you wonder where your local tax money goes.)

I also wonder, in a general sort of way, how much architecture matters to education. It seems to me that school reformers of various sorts have from time to time gotten captivated by school design as a way to magically make things better, whereas, really, what matters is the quality of the interactions between teachers and students. MIT seems to do a pretty good job with the ugliest collection of buildings in the world.

Cao Comes Through

When Joseph Cao won a house seat from New Orleans, I singled out this Republican immigrant from Vietnam and former Jesuit seminarian as a remarkable American story. Now he has repaid my praise by becoming the only Republican to vote for the House health care bill. I would be a lot more excited about this bill, which passed 220-215, if I thought it had any chance in the Senate.

Leaves

It was a gorgeous day today, warm, sunny and dry. Even though all the leaves weren't down, I decided to go ahead and rake -- you never know what next weekend is going to be like.

And leaf raking means a pile to jump in. Here Ben, Clara and three kids from two doors down do what fall always means to me.

The Last of the Garden

Yesterday I pulled out all the dead annuals in the garden, leaving just the bare bones of rose bushes and a few lingering perennials. And dreams of next spring.

A Modern Lullaby

Tell the monster that lives ‘neath your bed
To go somewhere else instead
Or you’ll kick him in the head

Tell the creature that lurks behind the door
If he knows what’s good he won’t come here no more
Cause you’ll kick in his butt at the count of four

Goodnight demon slayer, goodnight
Now it’s time to close your tired eyes
There are devils to slay and dragons to ride
If they see you coming, hell they’d better hide

Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
Goodnight my little slayer goodnight

Tell the monster that eats children, that you taste bad
And you’re sure you’d be the worst he’s ever had
If he eats you, don’t you fret, just cut him open with an axe
Don’t regret it, he deserved it, he’s a cad

Tell the harpies that land on your bed post
That at the count of five you’ll roast them alive
Tell the devil it’s time you gave him his due
He should go back to hell, he should shake in his shoes
Cause the mightiest, scariest, creature is you

Goodnight demon slayer, goodnight
Now it’s time to close your tired eyes
There’s devils to slay and dragons to ride
If they see you coming, hell they’d better hide

Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
Goodnight my little slayer goodnight

I won’t tell you, there’s nothing ‘neath your bed
I won’t sell you, that it’s all in your head
This world of ours is not as it seems
The monsters are real but they’re not in your dreams
Learn what you can from the beasts you defeat,
you’ll need it for some of the people you meet

Goodnight demon slayer, goodnight
Now its time to close your tired eyes
There are devils to slay and dragons to ride
If they see you coming, hell they’d better hide

Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight
Goodnight my little slayer goodnight

--Aurelio Voltaire Hernandez

Listen to the song.

Uncovering a Dastardly Plot

Former FDA director David Kessler has written a new book in which he exposes a horrifically evil plot concocted by America's restaurant owners and junk food manufacturers: they make food that people like! From Reason:

Kessler fearlessly accuses major restaurant chains of a crime they brag about, relying on unnamed “insiders” to reveal that comestible pushers such as Cinnabon and The Cheesecake Factory deliberately make their food delicious—or, as he breathlessly puts it, “design food specifically to be highly hedonic.” Kessler certainly has the goods on the corporate conspiracy to serve people food they like. “We come up with craveable flavors, and the consumers come back, even days later,” a “research chef at Chili’s” confesses to him. Kessler also reveals that Nabisco lures Oreo eaters through a dastardly combination of sweet white filling and crunchy, bittersweet chocolate wafers, achieving “what’s called dynamic contrast" . . . .

Not only do these sneaky bastards create irresistible food; they then turn around and tell people about it. “With its ability to create superstimuli, coupled with its marketing prowess, the industry has cracked the code of conditioned hypereating and learned exactly how to manipulate our eating behavior,” Kessler writes. “It has figured out the programming that gets us to pursue the food it wants to sell.”

The abstemious moralism of Kessler and his ilk makes me feel the way a Cheesecake Factory menu makes him feel: queasy.

Seen on the Road

Driving around yesterday I spotted a couple of interesting things, a black Acura with a license plate that said 1BADESQ, and a bumper sticker that said GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS, ESPECIALLY OUR SNIPERS. Do you suppose that was serious, or was it a pacifist joke?

Umbrella Art

Amusing collection of umbrella art installations.

All I Have to Say about Mass Shootings

Was said yesterday by James Fallows:

One consequence of having been alive through a lot of modern American history is remembering a lot of mass shootings. I was working at a high school summer job when news came over the radio that Charles Whitman had gunned down more than 40 people, killing 14, from the main tower at the University of Texas at Austin. I was editing a news magazine during the schoolyard killings in Paducah, Kentucky in 1997 and sent reporters to try to figure out what it all meant. I can remember where I was when the live-news coverage switched to the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, and the shootings at the one-room schoolhouse in the Amish country of Pennsylvania, and the Virginia Tech shootings two years ago. And all the rest.

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the "expert" talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre "mean"? A decade later, do we "know" anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They've got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don't mean nothing.

RIP.

Uncivil Students

The Chronicle has just republished a two-year-old essay by Thomas Benton about incivility among students:

There are the students who refuse to address us appropriately; who make border-line insulting remarks in class when called upon (enough to irritate but not enough to require immediate action); who arrive late and slam the door behind them; who yawn continually and never cover their mouths; who neglect to bring books, paper, or even something with which to write; who send demanding e-mail messages without a respectful salutation; who make appointments and never show up (after you just drove 20 miles and put your kids in daycare to make the meeting).

In my limited college teaching experience -- ten courses, all told -- I have never experienced much in the way of rudeness from my students, and I don't really know what to make of this. My biggest class has had about 40 students, so I have never had to face a huge lecture hall where who knows what might go on in the back row. But I still have trouble matching my own experience with complaints like these.

One part of it is probably expectations. Among Benton's pet peeves, it seems, is students who won't even pretend to care about his classes:

I don't understand students who are so self-absorbed that they don't think their professors' opinion of them (and, hence, their grades) will be affected by those kinds of behaviors, or by remarks like, "I'm only taking this class because I am required to." One would think that the dimmest of them would at least be bright enough to pretend to be a good student.

This doesn't bother me at all. If my students want a strictly business relationship with me, I am perfectly happy to grade the work they hand in, ask them a few questions in class and otherwise ignore them. I think it is the height of arrogance to assume that every student should care about what I teach, and bad manners to complain when people refuse to lie.

I also wonder if maybe Thomas Benton gets more than his share of rudeness because he is kind of weird:

Every morning, after setting up all the multimedia components I'm going to need, I stand at the door of my 8:30 a.m. classroom in my jacket and tie and say, "Good morning" to each entering student.

Only a few will say "Hi" or "Good morning" in return. About half will give me a somewhat confused nod, not quite making eye contact. The rest will not even look at me; they look at their shoes and keep walking, exuding a vaguely suspicious and hostile air. . . . Whatever the explanation, I sometimes feel stung by students' rudeness.

Now, see, part of good manners is acting according to the accepted rules of the situation. And standing in the door to your classroom, saying "good morning" to every student, is, as far as I am concerned, a violation of protocol. It's just not done. No wonder students look at the floor; they are so confused by this peculiar behavior that they don't know what to do or say. After setting up the multi-media components I am going to need, I leave the room and return at the moment when class is to start. This seems to be what my students expect, and they always respond well to it.

I am curious if any of my professor friends have had experiences like Benton's.

De Soto was Here

It seems amazing that the passage of Hernando de Soto and his small army across the Southeast in 1539 to 1540 left so many clear traces, but archaeologists have now documented what seems to be the third site where De Soto and his men must have visited. This one is an Indian village near McRae, Georgia. The other two are the camp where De Soto spent the winter of 1539 to 1540, near Tallahassee, and a small fort in western North Carolina.

Worse than Slovenia

Nick Kristof has been noting lately that the US does not have the best healthcare system in the world, and that, for example, we rank 31st in life expectancy and 37th in infant mortality. But he seems to have gone too far in comparing American healthcare to what people get in Slovenia:

In several columns, I’ve noted indignantly that we have worse health statistics than Slovenia. For example, I noted that an American child is twice as likely to die in its first year as a Slovenian child. The tone — worse than Slovenia! — gravely offended Slovenians. They resent having their fine universal health coverage compared with the notoriously dysfunctional American system.

As far as I can tell, every Slovenian has written to me. Twice. So, to all you Slovenians, I apologize profusely for the invidious comparison of our health systems. Yet I still don’t see anything wrong with us Americans aspiring for health care every bit as good as yours.

On the other hand, there are a few things we do right:

Moreover, there is one American health statistic that is strikingly above average: life expectancy for Americans who have already reached the age of 65. At that point, they can expect to live longer than the average in industrialized countries. That’s because Americans above age 65 actually have universal health care coverage: Medicare. Suddenly, a diverse population with pockets of poverty is no longer such a drawback.

Message: when it comes to healthcare, socialism works.